'Riot' an uneven tale of murder and cultural conflict

Associated Press Writer

In 1989, in a remote town in northern India, a group of Hindus began their Saturday preparing for a religious procession that would lead them to the ancient holy site of a Hindu temple now occupied by a Muslim mosque.

Passions were heated at the day's beginning, and blood was shed at day's end, in a Hindu-Muslim riot that claimed eight lives. One of the victims was Priscilla Hart, 24, an American aid worker devoted to women's reproductive health.

Shashi Tharoor's novel "Riot" centers on the questions surrounding Priscilla's death:

Who would kill this bright-eyed do-gooder? Was it the enraged husband of one of her charity cases or her Indian lover's jealous wife? Maybe it was the result of a xenophobic attack. Or had Priscilla simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time?

"Riot" purports to be a love story, and there is a fair share of romance, with steamy scenes of sexual awakening, forbidden fruits and anguished heartbreak. But the story is more notable for its lessons in cultural collision, religious xenophobia and the ownership of history, for which the love story serves as only a vehicle. The Western reader will not finish the book with a heart wrought weepy by unfulfilled love, but with a mind expanded by a new understanding of violent religious conflict that a secular society so often struggles to comprehend.

The setting is the village of Zalilgarh, typical to India for its struggles to harbor the coexistence of peoples divided and redivided along lines of language, region, caste, class and religion. Tharoor writes that this fragile society seems "bound to fall apart on one or several of these cleavages" but that it has "belied every doomsayer who's predicted its imminent disintegration" because "they underestimated the resilience of Indian democracy, which gave everyone, however underprivileged or disaffected, a chance to pursue his or her hopes and ambitions within the common system."

It is within this context that Priscilla is devoting every ounce of her youthful idealism to women's reproductive education. Caught up in an altruistic love affair with India, Priscilla also falls hard for the local district magistrate, a married man whose romantic soul and stifled sexuality find a bliss in Priscilla that threatens to compromise all his intrinsically Indian values and traditions.

Tharoor's main pitfall is the experimental narrative style he uses, telling the story from a variety of viewpoints in a scrapbook assemblage of newspaper clippings, journal entries, interview transcripts and ill-fitted "dialogues" that grasp for a comfortable definition.

At rock-bottom are the instances in which Tharoor, a senior United Nations official and an Indian, writes letters and journal entries in the voice of Priscilla, a young, blond, blue-eyed American woman. Priscilla's character begins as a one-dimensional cliche. Although as the story progresses she demonstrates enough intelligence and thoughtfulness to give her a bit of depth, she never becomes more than a slightly embarrassing image of American womanhood.

Throughout the book, there is a pervading self-consciousness on Tharoor's part that is further compounded when he suddenly feels the need to explain to the reader, through the voice of one of his characters, exactly what he is attempting to do with his narrative style. He writes:

"Let your readers bring themselves to the book that they're reading! Let them bring to the page their own memories of love and hate, their own feelings of joy and sorrow, their own reactions of disgust and pity, their own stirrings of courage and pride and compassion. And if they do that, why should form matter? Let the form of the novel change with each reading, and let the content change too."

In the end, this botched experiment is forgivable because the inspiration is sincere and the final message, that "the singular thing about truth ... is that you can only speak of it in the plural," is arrived at in a way that illuminates with disarming clarity the essential issues of which "Riot" is about.